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Eldest was shedding layers of protection with each passing day along with the dirt and rags that had accompanied her on her escape. The nagging guilt of having left the others behind still stalked her, and though it pained her like a knife to the skin, she didn’t reapply her skills of forgetting to it. That would be too easy on herself. And in this soft new life that she didn’t deserve, she couldn’t absolve herself of all pain.

On the third day Father invited Eldest to his office. She stood with her arms held close to her sides, worried she would knock scrolls off shelves or ink off the desk in the cramped and crowded space.

“Let’s see if we can’t teach you your letters, Mol.” Father beckoned her closer. “I could do with some help around here.”

“Wouldn’t Rebekka be better? She knows so much—”

“Bek’s going to the Academy soon. She’ll be busy there.”

Eldest knew that people studied hard at academies. Maybe this copy work would be beneath her sister. “I can try. I know a little bit.”

Father rubbed his kind, tired eyes, put his glasses on, and drew the first letter. “Give this one a go.” He turned the scrap of stained parchment around and laid the quill beside it.

Eldest copied the alpha, doing her very best to be true to the lines Night-Father had drilled into them. She wanted her real father to be proud of her.

“Hmmm.” Father studied the letter. “Very good.”

“Here.” He wrote five more letters, dipped the quill, and wrote a word in cursive.

Eldest copied those too.

Father turned the page, his eyebrows lifting. He brought the candle closer, his frown deepening.

“Did I do something wrong?” Eldest knew she must be making mistakes that only a scribe could see. Of all the children at the mansion, though, she had been by far the best writer. It was a skill she shared with Day-Father, much as she disliked the idea that they had anything in common. But she did have a sure hand, both with the quill and the knife.

“Try this.” Father bent over the parchment and with furious concentration filled the remaining space with several lines of the classic poem “Hegda on the Bridge.” He wrote with speed, spotting ink only in one place, trembling some of the loops but in all a clean piece. “Fast as you can.” He turned the parchment over to expose a new face and thrust it at her along with the quill.

“Quick as I can…” It would slow her to turn the parchment to check the words every so often, and Father couldn’t have wanted that. But luckily it was a piece she knew. Day-Father had made them memorize many poems and tested them regularly. Children who performed badly missed a meal.

Eldest bent to her task and wrote out the stanza in a clear, flowing line. She finished faster than her father had and sat back smiling with the ink still glistening on the parchment. She’d thought her smile would be echoed, but her father looked almost angry.

“That’s enough. Go down and help Myra.” He crushed the parchment in his fist as she left.

On the fourth day after breakfast, Mother took both sisters to the Sun Market, the best one for fruit and vegetables, named for the square it was held in. They went from stall to stall, watched over by a weathered statue of Apollo. Mother seemed snappy and impatient with them, but compared to the monster in the basement and to torture in the dark it was a small thing, concerning only because it signalled some unhappiness Eldest didn’t understand and couldn’t mend. It was a new kind of hurt, small but deep.

Eldest wore one of Rebekka’s old smocks, grey and fraying but a big improvement on the stinking rags that Mother had burned the first morning. She had no shoes, as they had sold Rebekka’s when she grew out of them, but her feet were well wrapped in strips of parchment, offcuts from her father’s work.

Eldest kept her head down, meeting no one’s gaze for fear of finding herself face to face with Day-Father. The numbers, though, were such that any worries seemed far-fetched, and this was just one of the city’s many markets, Mother said, and a smaller one at that.

Eldest watched as her mother, who looked thinner, greyer, and more drawn than the mothers of other children at the market, counted out her coins with a miser’s care, buying only small amounts of the least interesting staples: potatoes, carrots, barley for thickening the meatless stews she served. Eldest compared the concern creasing Mother’s face to the joy bubbling beneath her own tensions. She worried now that rather than her return answering her parents’ prayers as it had her own, it might have added to their burdens.

“Mother looks sad,” Eldest whispered to her sister.

“She was sad before you came back.” Rebekka took Eldest’s hand and squeezed it. “Father doesn’t make much money…And they worry that I’m sick.” Rebekka looked sad now too and Eldest felt her own joy wilting, as if sorrow were a disease that had spread between them.

They followed Mother home, passing a statue of an older sun god, Helios—deity of the dark sun, whose fire is time, the blaze in which humanity burns. His legend tells that the day-sun is his mouth and one day it will open to consume all the planets. Eldest kept her head down, carrying the rope bag containing the vegetables. She spoke to Rebekka in a low voice as they trailed their mother. “Father said you’re going to go to the Academy. I don’t want you to leave.”

Rebekka coughed and looked grim. “I’m not pleased about it either. It’s a bad place.” She tried a smile. Eldest recognized it for the strained sort of grimace she herself had manufactured for the smallest children many times before. “At least Mother and Father will still have you.”

“I want to come too.” Eldest wasn’t sure that she did, but she didn’t want Rebekka to be alone.

“You really, really don’t. It’s worse than you can imagine,” Rebekka said, deadly serious. “Don’t say it again. Certainly, don’t let Father hear you!”

Later Rebekka went out with a basket of scrolls and papers to deliver to the various concerns that employed their father.

“That’s why he calls me Bek,” she said to Eldest at the door. “I’m at his beck and call.”

“Bek suits you better,” Eldest said. “It’s to the point. Like you are.”